Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope (edition 2008)

I could have easily given it a 1 star except for the fact that it was an intriguing story so I decided to give it 2 stars.
All the Bible talk got me annoyed and as someone else also mentioned, we still do not know how come they did not recognise there own daughter for 5 weeks!

Another thing I wonder about. How come Whitney has blocked the 5 weeks with the van Ryn's? So her memories after the accident only started when she finally got caught up with her family. That's quite telling. They also did not address that or what this mix up will have done to Whitney's healing process. I think more than 1/3rd if not half is talk about religion. ( )

It took me a couple of hours to read this book where the central question was never answered. Two girls from good Christian families (much is made of this, but I can't see how the book would have been any different - other than thinner - if they'd been atheists) were in a car crash. One was killed and buried without her parents ever seeing her presumably-mangled body. The other lived but was in a coma. The two girls were the same age, both blue-eyed blonde types and from the pictures, quite similar-looking. There was even a picture of the girl in the hospital in a cervical collar with her hair scraped back showing her uninjured face very clearly. So the central question is, how come for five weeks the family sitting with the girl never realised it wasn't their daughter? The girl tried to tell them as soon as she could! Unless they were identical twins, this had to be people deceiving themselves, but who knows? That is the only point of the book and it is never addressed. ( )

My blog post about this book is at this link. ( )

You probably remember this story from the news: a van carrying a group of students from Taylor University is involved in a horrible crash with five dead. After 5 weeks, it is discovered that there had been an error in identification, and that Laura Van Ryn, whose family had been by her side 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, was actually Whitney Cerak.

Let that sink in a minute. The Cerak family had buried "Whitney" weeks earlier, and her mother, Colleen, gets a phone call at 2:00 a.m. saying that there is reason to believe her daughter is actually alive.

Let that sink in a minute.

Mistaken Identity was co-written by the Ceraks and the Van Ryn families, and it is just an incredible story. Had it not been true and this had been a novel, I'd have thought it implausible.

All the little questions I had during the intense media coverage of this a couple years ago were answered. Things like, "Okay, so they were both blond and attractive, but they don't look that much alike," and "How could a mother not know her own child?" There were, in fact, little things that in hindsight should have been utter giveaways, but when you don't have any reason to believe that it is not your daughter lying in that bed in a coma, you just accept as fluke-y, and the fact the Van Ryns did so is totally understandable.

All those details are fascinating -- the fact that Laura's sister thought it odd that none of the clothes she got at the hospital that her sister had been wearing were things she recognized; the difference in the teeth (not noticed for weeks because a respirator was in her mouth, and then dismissed as possibly related to the violence of the wreck knocking things askew); the fact that "Laura" had a pierced belly-button and her sister was sure she'd have told her if she'd done that.

It is only at the end of the grueling 5 weeks, when "Laura" begins talking that questions arise. The fact that she calls out names the Van Ryns don't recognize is explained away by the nurses as "her neurons are firing, but not firing correctly, so who knows where that name came from?" With no real reason to doubt that "Laura" isn't "Laura," I have a feeling I'd have let it go, too.

Mistaken Identity truly captures the roller-coaster of emotions of both these families, and what became their tender care of each other when the unimaginable mistake was discovered. What is most amazing is the very obvious comfort the faith of both these families brought them in their most devastating moments.

While I can't say this book is brilliantly written, it is raw, and it is real, and it is stunning.

( )

I am not normally one ofr true stories but this one landed on my lap so I read it.
One of the problems with this style of book is the flat character, caused by the fact that the "characters" are real people who will read and have input into the final product. Much of this is overcome in this case by the addition of the extracts from letters and a blog which was created at the time. With all that I can complain I did find myself physically crying during reading this book.
The book tells the story but I find little hope in it. I guess that this style of book is simply not my normal choice. for those who like this sort of thing I would suggest that this is on of the better ones.
the basic story is of two girls involved in a car crash only one survived. The bodies were misidentified and the wrong name was given to the one who remainined. This led to one family believeing they had buried thier daughter while a different one belied that she was infact thier daughter. this in the end had to come to light